Legacy Modernization

Legacy IT systems are often the weakest link for established companies seeking to innovate and compete successfully within their industry. There is tremendous financial pressure to get as much as possible from the investments in legacy systems. Over time, the budgetary pressure fuels the implementation of ‘temporary’ work-arounds creating an unmanageable patchwork of technologies, applications and data systems.

In fact, research shows that companies are actually increasing costs and more importantly they are missing opportunities to become efficient, agile and innovative.

By contrast, new or established competitors unburdened by legacy IT systems have been reaping the rewards from reduced operational costs, accelerated time to market and increased customer experience.

Working with the right partner and technologies plays a pivotal role in helping you achieve success in your migration projects and avoid potential pitfalls. Done right, the benefits are well worth the effort. After all, legacy systems modernization yields more cost effective, efficient, responsive and competitive environments that position your business to address new requirements.

Schedule inventory of all schema’s, programs, DDL, Jcl, Scripts, documentation in order to make sure that we have everything that is necessary to get a complete knowledge of the application and data to be migrated (aka database mapping).

Evaluate risks by highlighting all propagation changes, all incompatibilities between legacy structures and relational structures as well as sorting the programs based on their risk.

Execute data migration after having controlled the quality of the data (data quality rules). Adapt automatically the programs enabling them to access the relational DB instead of the legacy DB. During this process we will also automatically detect the programs that have to be re-written because their logic is incompatible with relational DB logic in terms of performance.

Do a complete data migration validation by controlling the exhaustiveness and consistency of the migration before testing the programs.

Case Studies

Ministry of Finances (Belgium)

The Ministry executed the migration of the citizen tax database from Bull GCOS to open world. The Ministry chose REVER tools for the precision of the results, the true relational DB generated (no legacy technical columns emulation) in order to immediately use standard BI tools, and the respect of the timing and budget.

Oklahoma OESC (USA)

Use of the new generation semantic analysis set of tools to reverse engineer and migrate a complex legacy system written in an obsolete network database to a new, relational, open software platform. The legacy database contains more than 500 different types of records accessed by more than 2,500 Cobol programs. Our partner (Bull USA) chose REVER tools because they allowed to reconstruct the semantic schema of the Source database, allowing the business people to recuperate all the knowledge hidden in the DB and the Cobol programs and allowing easy evolution of the DB to follow the constant change in the Oklahoma employment legislation.